Technical Field
The present invention relates to networks, and more particularly to path latency monitoring in software-defined networks.
Description of the Related Art
Network latency contributes to the performance of many data center applications such as search, e-commerce, and banking Such applications often have several distributed components that need to communicate across low-latency network paths to reduce user response time and maximize provider revenue. To effectively manage the data center network and provide low-latency paths to applications, operators must continually monitor the latency on all paths and quickly route the traffic away from paths with high delay.
To monitor the network paths latency, data center operators have two perspectives: from the application; and from the network. A simple and common approach is to send probes (e.g., ping) between application servers and measure their response time. Many data center operators are reluctant to repeatedly run expensive measurements from end-hosts and prefer to allocate resources to customer Virtual Machines (VMs). In addition, some data centers, such as collocation centers, restrict operator access to customer servers. The alternative is to monitor the latency from the network. However, all of the conventional solutions require expensive instrumentation and coordination to capture and processes latency measurements.